Break’s over, let the grinding commence

January 5, 2015

I don’t know about you, but I really enjoyed the laid back game pace during the Christmas/New Year break. I did log in nearly every day to do my garrison chores, but it seemed leisurely to me. One of my guilds suspended raiding for two full weeks, and the other adopted a if-you-show-up-fine-if-you-don’t-fine approach for the period. I was able to gear up my two main hunters to 650, which for many of you is probably pretty low but I am happy with it for now. My MW monk is pushing 99, and I even leveled up my poor warlock from 92 to 93 just by doing garrison chores. My two level 3 barns are producing Savage Blood at a decent pace, which means I have been able to do several upgrades to my crafted gear without breaking the bank. I replaced all my lumberyards with trading posts, and now garrison resource production is way up on every alt. My main hunters both have level 3 Dwarven Bunkers, so I am getting the free seal each week. And I am able to crank out a reasonable number of 640 crafted leather, mail, cloth, and JC gear. Not enough to sell yet, but enough to easily equip alts with their allotted 3 pieces. I am also self-sufficient for flasks, pots, enchants, gems, and food — including tons of raid food for all.

I did NOT attempt the Molten Core special event, a sanity-saving decision on my part. After getting into a couple of queues and seeing the wait time at well over an hour each time, and after hearing some real horror stories from guildies about the actual raid, I decided it was not worth the aggravation and time commitment for me. I never ran it in vanilla, so there certainly was no nostalgia factor. I am not much of a mount freak, and honestly a big ugly core hound just does not interest me. And a 640 helm? Got a couple better than that, thanks. So I look at not running MC as a net gain.

About the only bad aspect to the break was the huge number of what I can only believe were bored adolescents and pre-teens incessantly showing off their smut talk in trade chat every day. Thank goodness for school starting up again.

Over the next few weeks I will be leveling my alts, delving deeper into follower recruitment, and of course trying to keep up with each new garrison. I’ll finish leveling the MW this week and start relearning my healing skills, which is not something I look forward to. I enjoy healing, but I find it quite stressful, and I know I am far from proficient at it.

Speaking of garrison chores, there was an interesting blue post today from Takralus:

We’re looking into ways to make Garrisons a bit more friendly in future patches for those of you who enjoy alts. We see that Garrisons are a bit too much for you guys right now.

I grant you, this is not much to pin high hopes on, and “future patches” does not necessarily mean the next patch, but it is something. At least it seems Blizz realizes the huge time commitment garrisons require, and possibly they also see that it’s not really part of a cohesive story line for each of your alts to operate completely independently of one another. At the very least, I am hoping for soulbound craft mats to become BoA. It would also be nice if somehow they could combine the mines and herb farms for all alts, such that running through them and gathering the mats on one alt each day would gather from all of them. Stay tuned, I guess.